“Where are we going?” Zenny asks. “And why is there sixty dollars tucked into your console?”

“You’ll see. And there’s sixty dollars because it’s a fancy date, Zenny-bug.” I’m kidding, obviously, because I could easily spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single night with her—and I considered it, I really did. I thought about whisking her away to St. Bart’s or Paris or the Seychelles, but somehow I knew that wouldn’t impress her.

And I do want to impress her. Or more accurately, I want her to have fun, I want her to be happy, I want her to feel what it’s like not to have the world on her shoulders. I want to see her smile and laugh. I want tonight to belong to her, not to her nursing degree, not to her shelter, not to her family’s subverted expectations. Nothing gets to claim her tonight but laughter and bad pizza.

Zenny misses the humor in my tone though, because she rubs her hands uncomfortably on her jeans. “Should I change?”

I glance pointedly down at my own clothes—jeans and an artfully rumpled button-down. “You’re dressed perfectly.”

“Okay,” she says, and then makes a noise that is somewhere between nervousness and self-deprecation at said nervousness. “Between the new nursing scrubs and the jumper, sometimes I feel like I forget how to dress for the real world. Not that I know where we’re going in the real world,” she adds pointedly.

I don’t take the bait. It’s going to be a fucking surprise. I shift gears as we merge onto the interstate south, and then I ask, “So you’ll wear the habit all the time after your vows, but you don’t have to wear the postulant’s uniform all the time now?”

Zenny leans back against the headrest and props her sneakers up on the dash. It’s such a young thing to do, such a college thing to do, and it makes me smile.

“Every order has their own rules about dress,” she says, not seeing my smile. “With SGS, when and where the postulant wears her uniform is determined between the postulant and the prioress. In my case, the Reverend Mother wants me in street clothes more often than not, because she’s concerned about my youth. We agreed on the shelter and at monastery events, and that’s it for me. But I’ve seen some postulants wear their uniforms all the time.”

I think about this for a minute. Come to some important conclusions. “I still want to fuck you in your postulant’s uniform.”

This earns me a lip bite and a very studious examination of her sneakers. “Okay,” she murmurs, and I don’t miss the way she squirms in her seat.

My smile gets bigger.

On the way to our date, Zenny guesses all sorts of places we could be going, all of them wrong. She guesses restaurants and movies—which I scoff at like a cynical Wakefield pirate—and then suggests other things I almost wish I’d thought of, like the arboretum or the local improv club. But no—we’re going to a place less classy and far more juvenile than an improv club, and I tell her that, which puzzles her for a long time.

I finally exit the highway on one of those indiscriminate suburban exits, the kind that have a hotel for no reason and a McDonalds and a chiropractor’s office, and navigate a few turns to our destination. Then I park the car and turn to face her.

“Well?” I say.

She gives me one of those Hollywood starlet eyebrows. “Are you actually taking me to a skating rink?”

“Yes, I am, Zenny-bug. Your skates are in the trunk,” I say as I grab my things and open my door.

“Wait…my skates? I don’t have any…” she trails off as she follows me outside the car to the trunk and sees that she does, indeed, have a pair of skates.

“I didn’t want to take a chance on them not having rental skates available,” I explain as I lift our things out of the trunk and shut it. “So I noted your shoe size and had my assistant order some skates.”

She stares at me a moment and then shakes her head in incredulity. Her face is crinkling up into an amused smile, however, so I know I’m not in too much trouble.

“Okay, rich boy,” she says.

“This is not a rich-boy date,” I protest, offended. “This is exactly the kind of normal date normal people go on.”

She laughs. “With their custom-ordered skates and their Audi R8 parked outside?”

“Well, I’m not going to compromise on everything.”

She tucks an arm into my elbow, glowing up at me. “I have to admit, this is exactly the kind of date I’d want to go on if this were real. Let’s do it.”

And we go inside, pay our six-dollar admission fees, and stroll into the dimly lit, badly carpeted lobby. Top-forty pop music blares awkwardly through the mostly empty space, and the smell of stale popcorn permeates the air, and Zenny’s if this were real chafes at me. I’m starting to have the uncomfortable feeling that I’m in a Wakefield novel myself, that I’m the hapless hero or heroine who starts to fall in love even though I know better, even though I know that’s not the arrangement, even though I know I’ll have my heart broken.

But I can’t stop. It’s like watching a tornado carve up a prairie field, like watching hail tear through leaves and roofs and dirt. It’s happening, and all I can do is take shelter.

Zenny’s skates fit perfectly, and so do my new blades, and she gives a delighted little clap of her hands as I pop up and skate backwards around the table. The light pings off the stud in her nose, and she’s so fucking hot, so fucking young, and I want to fast forward to the end of the night and what I have planned, but I manage to keep myself under control. As soon as she has her skates on and she’s stowed her shoes, we roll out to the rink itself, a wood-floored affair crowded with disco balls and scores of teenagers too young to do anything more interesting with their Saturday nights.

“I didn’t know you could skate like this!” she exclaims, as I move in circles around her.

“Elijah and I played roller hockey, remember?” I say, moving in front of her and skating backwards as she tentatively skates forward.

“I was a baby,” she points out in playful exasperation. “Of course I don’t remember.”

“Oh yeah,” I say. And she’s right. In fact, Elijah and I both quit roller hockey the year Zenny was born—me because it was not one of those sports that netted lots of attention from girls, like basketball or football, and Elijah because he was so busy with his ten trillion other extracurriculars that he had to start dropping things to make time for the activities he really wanted to do.

A quick bite of shame follows the realization. Because what am I doing with this girl, really? Who do I think I am? There’s got to be a special hell for men who fuck their best friend’s sister, especially when their best friend’s little sister is much, much too young for the kind of fucking I like to do.

I execute a few figure eights around Zenny, trying to push these thoughts away, and my antics earn me more clapping, which only makes me peacock more. I know I’m thirty-six, but it feels really good to show off sometimes, okay? Even on rollerblades.

It only takes Zenny a few laps for her legs to remember how to move on skates, and then we settle into a nice pace, holding hands and talking to each other over the music. I feel like a kid, like a teenager, electric that she’s holding my hand, stealing glances at her tight ass moving under her jeans. The breeze created by our movement plasters her T-shirt against her body, and under the thin, worn-through cotton, I can see the divot of her navel, the smooth cups of her bra. I can see the place where her hips flare out from her narrow waist, the outline of the button of her jeans. A button that I plan to have unbuttoned very soon.

I adjust myself subtly as we skate, and sneak a look at my watch. Twenty more minutes and I’ll be able to put my sixty dollars to work.

“See something you like?” Zenny asks dryly, noticing my gaze and my not-as-subtle-as-I-thought handling of my cock.

“Just reading your T-shirt,” I pretend to lie, knowing she’ll see right through it and not caring. I want her to know how much I look at her, how much I want her. I want her to have me at full force, full desire, not only because it’s what she wanted out of this arrangement, but because I don’t know if I can actually hold myself back. It might kill me to pretend to want her less.

“Uh-huh,” Zenny says, in a voice that conveys that she’s clearly on to my lecherous ways, but she glances down at her shirt anyway. It’s a mission trip T-shirt from several years ago, with the words Maison de Naissance printed underneath the picture of a cross superimposed on the outline of Haiti.

It rings a bell, and I manage to fish out a fuzzy memory of Tyler’s wife talking about Maison de Naissance.

“That’s a birthing center, isn’t it?” I ask, nodding at her shirt.

“It is,” she affirms, looking a bit impressed that I know that. “Do you speak French?”

“Only enough to order good food.”

“Ha. Well, it’s actually a place that provides prenatal and postpartum care to women and babies. We went there for a mission trip—it was my first mission trip ever—and I just fell in love.”

“With the babies?”

She spreads her fingers in my hand, gesturing. “With all of it. Every part of it. Mom and Dad had pushed me toward medicine or law, and growing up, I thought that’s what I wanted too. But there was something about medicine that always felt—I don’t know—sterile, I guess. Impersonal. But when I went to work with the nurses and midwives down there, a part of me came alive. It was so necessary, so intimate, so…human. To be with these women while they carried their babies and labored them into the world. And to know what huge differences small interventions could make—it felt magical. There’s no glory in it, there’s no money, but the magic is better than both those things.”

“And that’s when you started thinking about becoming a nurse-midwife?”

She nods. “Dad was so upset. Of course, he’d rather I’d chosen something like surgery or oncology, but at the very least couldn’t I compromise and study obstetrics? But I guess I know too many doctors, and I felt that choosing obstetrics over midwifery would limit me. I didn’t want to be a doctor at all, I didn’t want to be wearing a white coat and playing God.” She sighs, and the sound is mostly lost in the whirr of our wheels over the wood floor. “It was a hard fight. But there was no changing my mind.”

“So what happens after you graduate? Will you ever get to practice midwifery if you’ve taken vows?”

Her face lights up, as if I’ve asked exactly the right question. “I’ll still have two years of midwifery school after I graduate with my RN next spring. But the Reverend Mother and I have plans. See, so many of the people who come into our shelter are in some stage of needing maternal care—either they’re pregnant or they’re about to deliver or maybe they have a young infant and they’re struggling to breastfeed—and most of them don’t have access to healthcare. Some of them are afraid to go to a hospital, even when they’re in labor, because they’re undocumented and they’re frightened of being arrested or deported. Some people simply can’t afford it. So what if we opened up our own birthing center? Here in Kansas City? There’s a huge need for it, and by the time I finish my midwifery degree, we’ll hopefully have enough money and all the right permissions to launch it. We could help so many people, Sean, from all walks of life. We can really make a difference.”

I’m captivated by the passion in her voice. I can’t remember feeling this passionate about anything, about any cause, any vocation, ever in my life, and the gap between us in this is both humbling and absorbing. I feel like I could spend the next year thinking about it and only just begin to unravel the rift between the kind of woman Zenny is and the kind of man I am.

Zenny saw suffering and it made her want to engage and change things and invest her life in helping. The literal only time in my life that I’ve seen and felt real suffering—Lizzy’s suicide—my response was to reject everything. To disengage. To scorn.

For the first time, I begin to understand why Tyler went back to the Church. Why he became a priest.

And suddenly I feel strange about my own choices, about my own convictions. They feel flat and callow next to Zenny’s lively, energetic zeal. I’m not used to feeling that way about myself, and it’s rather uncomfortable.

“If I hadn’t brokered the Keegan deal, how were you planning on fitting a birthing center into the shelter? You’re already crammed into that space just doing normal shelter stuff.”

She gives a shrug. “We would have asked the owner for more space in the building, since it was empty anyway. Or found an off-site location. We have faith that something will open up.”

I’m about to say that she doesn’t need faith, that she has me and I’ll make sure she gets the best fucking space available in this city, but my conversation with my mom is still rattling around my head, a loose ball bearing denting up my thoughts. It’s like no one cares about what I can do when they have faith, and I find that’s making me rather surly.

Instead, I check my watch and see that it’s time for my sixty dollars to find their new home.

“Be right back,” I say, giving Zenny a quick kiss and then dashing off toward the front desk of the rink, dodging teenagers as I go.

And when I come back, she’s leaning against the railing on the outside of the rink, watching the clumps of youths skate around.

“Everything okay?” I ask, because she looks very pensive right now, and not a little sad.

“Oh, yes,” she assures me. “I’m just thinking about things.”

I lean next to her, bumping her hip gently with my own. “What kinds of things? More about the birthing center?”

“I wish. It’s more like thinking about the birthing center made me think about that first mission trip, and that made me think about being a teenager again…like, I just—” She stops, and I get the feeling she doesn’t want to tell me. Or that she does, but doesn’t think she should. Finally she just lets it tumble out. “I’m not much older than the people in the rink, but I already feel like I missed out on so much. I didn’t have Saturday nights to goof around—if I wasn’t doing homework or volunteering or at a debate tournament, it was a dinner party with my parents’ friends or some society event we needed to be seen at. My teenage years were spent trying to make myself into the perfect Iverson daughter, and after I rejected all that, I felt like I had to work even harder. I had to be the best nursing student, the best postulant, to make throwing all that away worth it, and—”

I let her find her thoughts, her center. She’s twisting her fingers together as she talks, and twisting them hard enough to make her knuckles go tight. I don’t like that she’s hurting herself in her agitation, so I slide behind her and cup her hands with my own, forcing them to relax.

She sighs and melts back into me, her hair tickling irresistibly at my neck.

“I guess I just worry that I’ve thrown away the last three years too, trying to prove that I can succeed like this. Like, maybe this whole time I wasn’t working hard for just myself; even if it felt like I was doing it to spite my parents, in a way, it was still for my parents.”

“Are you saying you’re having doubts?” I ask, unable to quell the happy little spit of excitement kindling in my chest. “You can stop trying to prove your parents wrong and stop this nun thing and just marry me instead?”

She shakes with laughter in my arms. She thinks I’m joking.

Wait, I am joking right?

I’m definitely joking. Totally. I’m just joking that I want to see Zenny at the other end of a church aisle in a gorgeous white wedding gown, her nose ring glinting mischievously from under her veil. Or that I want to spend every night for the rest of my life kissing that delicious mouth and watching her sweet belly slowly grow with our children and cradling those tiny babies in my arms as I watched them coo and chirp and blink themselves to sleep.

Of course I’m only joking that I want to spend the rest of my life with the most beautiful, fascinating, sexy woman I’ve ever met. It’s all a joke. Ha ha ha. Hilarious.

Oh my God, I’m so fucked.

“Sean? Are you okay? You went all rigid and quiet all of a sudden.”

“Totally fine,” I lie, but unfortunately, my voice is all knotted and tight, and it makes it patently clear how not fine I am. I feel like I can barely breathe, because I don’t even know who Sean Bell is anymore, and all I want in the fucking world is to be close to this girl, but even having my arms around her doesn’t feel close enough. I’m acutely, painfully aware that she’ll never be mine. She’ll always be God’s.

But before she can call me out on my obvious upset, the DJ’s voice comes over the PA system, silencing all the chatter across the rink.

“And now we have a very special couples’ skate tonight. This song goes out to Zenny, from Sean.”

Zenny swivels in my arms, and there is no way to tell if she’s amused or alarmed because the expression on her face is very much both of these things.

“Zenny, Sean says you can make this sinner change his ways,” continues the DJ, and it’s actually a lyric from the song I picked, but he delivers it with such oozing smarminess that it really sounds like something a lover would say, and for a moment I wonder if I would say it. I already want to marry this girl—what else about my old sinner’s ways is going to change from being around her?

Bruno Mars’ “Locked Out of Heaven” starts playing as the lights dim and the disco balls start spinning. (Sixty dollars at work, everybody, sixty dollars that are now in the possession of the assistant manager—an assistant manager who also happens to be an old frat brother of Aiden’s.)

“I love this song,” she says, and it’s the most warily anyone has ever said those words in the history of the world.

I laugh and tug on her hand to pull her back onto the floor. “I know,” I tell her. “I did some research before we came here tonight.” I don’t tell her that “research” involved me scrolling through her Instagram like a lovesick teenager.

The DJ chides all the non-couple skaters off the floor, and soon it’s just pairs of awkward teens, and then me and Zenny, the only adults. And despite her initial wariness, Zenny warms up to my little gesture, holding my hand tightly and singing along with the words and looking so deliciously kissable that it’s everything I can do to keep skating and not swing her up into my arms and dash away with her like some kind of rollerblading caveman. And at the end of the song, she even allows me to tug us into a slow-rolling kiss in front of everyone, letting me nibble and taste at her lips until the rink breaks out into whoops and applause and she pulls away with a bashful smile.

“I’m sorry you missed out on so much teenage fun,” I say, as the song changes and we start skating again. “But you have to admit that some things are more fun as an adult.”

She gives me a naughty little smile. “Oh really? Show me another thing, then.”

“Is that a dare, Zenny-bug?”

The eyebrow goes up. “Are you up to the challenge?”

I make an arrogant boy noise and tug her off the rink floor, onto the bad carpet and toward the skate rental counter.

“Sean? Where are we—Sean!” My little rule-follower is panicking as I look both ways to make sure no one’s around and then duck under the counter, pulling her with me.

“Shhh, it’s okay,” I murmur. “I paid off the manager on duty.”

“You what—”

But then I’m skate-crowding her behind the walls and walls of rental skates, into a dark nook that’s hidden from view. I brace my hands on either side of her shoulders and pin her against the wall with my gaze. “Now, let me show you something a man can do better than a teenage boy.”

Even in the dim, weirdly-shadowed light, I can see her pupils go big, and even over the music, I can hear her breathing change. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I lean in, trace the line of her jaw with my nose. As always, she smells delicate and floral, like roses on the wind. “You see, if I were a teenage boy, I’d be so excited to have a girl as gorgeous as you back here that I wouldn’t be able to be patient. I’d be shoving my hand up your shirt and mauling at your tits. But I’m no boy, Zenny, and I know how to take my time.”

She shudders as I move my face in the graceful curve between her neck and shoulder and I breathe her in.

“I know that girls need special little kisses,” I murmur, kissing her neck softly. “Special little touches.” And then my hand drops to the outside of her thigh, and I run my fingers up the seam of her jeans until I find a belt loop. I hook my fingers in the loop and gently tug her hips forward. Our bodies are almost pressed together now, and she’s arching to me, trying to get closer, seeking out pressure and friction.

I don’t let her yet, returning my attention to her mouth. To those perpetually pouty lips, which I brush my own lips over until she opens for me. Until I can slide my tongue against hers in a soft, warm dance. God, that tongue of hers, with its tentative flickers and hesitant flutters. I can’t stop the growl in my throat as she bravely reaches up to my neck and pulls me tighter against her, deepening the kiss.

And the thought of her inexperienced tongue making those same little flickers and flutters on the head of my cock drives me near mad, sending a rush of need so violent through my blood that my hand fists itself around her belt loop and I growl into her mouth.

My noises make her pant and break away just enough to speak. “What else do girls need?” she asks breathlessly. “Show me what a boy couldn’t.”

My other hand trails swirls over the collar of her T-shirt, make teasing tracks over the cups of her bra, giving her enough sensation to titillate, but nowhere near enough to satisfy. “You mean you want a man to please you? You want me to put my hand down your panties and make this awful, little ache go away?”

She nods eagerly, her eyes big and her lips parted and her hips squirming. “I need your help,” she whispers. “No boy my age knows how to make me feel better.”

The game is morphing a little, edging onto a dangerously pitched slope, and then Zenny goes ahead and hurls us over the edge. “If I were still a teenager,” she says, her eyes finding mine, and fuck they are so dark and hungry there’s no way I’ll be able to say no to anything she wants. “And you were still a man…”

“It would be wrong,” I manage to say, although any judge able to look at my thoughts right now would send me straight to jail.

“Seventeen,” she says. “Almost to eighteen.”

“Unethical.”

Her hips finally make contact with mine, grinding against my erection. “So close to legal.”

My cock surges, and I’m shamefully hard. “Jesus Christ.”

“Four years ago,” she persists. “I’d be almost eighteen.”

“I’d be thirty-two, Zenny.”

“And what if that’s when you saw me again? What would you do?”

“I’d—” Fuck. I can’t think straight.

“If you saw me, and I told you I needed help? That my body felt all strange, and I knew only you could make it all better?”

“Zenny,” I say, I plead. She’s done that thing again where she’s flipped the control, stolen it away and left me dazed and staggering, even though I’m supposed to be the expert and she the virgin.

She takes the hand still plucking at her bra cup and guides it down to her jeans button. “Just pretend,” she murmurs. “It’s just make-believe. I know you wouldn’t, but now I am an adult and we can pretend that you would.”

“I—”

“What if I showed you where it hurt?” she asks, now guiding my hand to cup her pussy. It’s hot to the touch, even through the denim. She presses my hand against her harder, rubs against it. “If I begged and begged and begged? If I said, just this one time, just this once, teach me how to make my pussy feel better?”

Teach me how to make my pussy feel better. Jesus, I can’t resist that shit. I let out a wounded, hitched breath and she knows she has me. A triumphant smile plays over her mouth.

My hand drifts up to the button of her fly and works it open with practiced ease. We’re both looking down at it now, at the view of my hand framed by our roller skates and jeans, and her old T-shirt and my too-expensive watch, and it feels very, very easy to pretend right now. And then when I’ve worked her jeans open and slid my fingers down her panties and I’ve felt how fucking wet she is, all the pretending goes out the window.

“Baby,” I whisper, wrapping one arm around her waist to hold her steady as I tickle over her slick folds. “My little nun is so wet for me.”

She whimpers the moment my fingers find her opening. “Is this what you need, sweetheart? For me to finger this virgin pussy?”

She gives a desperate little nod, gasping out a please as she tries to push against my fingers. Her skates make her move and buck and the only thing anchoring her is my arm on her waist and the two big fingers circling her entrance. My hand in her most secret place is tender, capable, working her open by degrees as my palm cups her clit.

“You think you’re ready for two fingers?” I ask.

“I—” Her head is rolling back against the wall. “Yes, God, please.”

“That’s good,” I tell her. “You need to learn to take more fingers if you’re ever going to grow up and take my cock.”

My shameful, forbidden words have her eyes fluttering closed and her hands fisting at my shirt. “Yes, please, please,” she moans, and I slide both fingers home.

She’s so fucking tight and so wet that my hand is coated in her, and she’s so gorgeous like this, so lovely and sexy and mine, my bold sort-of virgin, and it’s so easy to forget that she’s going to leave me, that it’s not really me she wants but my body and my experience. It’s easy to pretend she actually wants me, bossy, flawed Sean, and that when she starts letting out my name in these breathless, air-starved bursts as she rides my hand, it’s because she’s feeling the same thing I’m feeling: this keen, jagged edge of longing.

“It feels so good,” she manages. “Oh God, Sean, it feels so good, it feels so good—”

She thrashes and thrashes and still I tend to her sweet little pussy the way it needs, petting the spots inside that make her moan and rubbing at her clit, and then I bury my face in her neck and breathe in the sex and rose smell of her as she lets out a low cry and clenches hard around my fingers. More of her wetness soaks over my skin and her pussy seizes in long, luscious pulses, and I’m so fucking hard, but I think that I could almost give up my own satisfaction if I got to give Zenny pleasure like this every day. It’s heady, almost as heady as an orgasm of my own.

The pleased, affectionate—and yes, proud—glow I feel as I slide my hands out of her panties and slowly button her up is more potent than anything I’ve ever felt. I lick my fingers clean like the animal I am as she watches me with hooded eyes, and then I say, “That isn’t even the beginning of what I had planned for this pussy tonight.”

And this time, she’s the one to grab my hand and yank me away, right to our shoes and socks, and she’s the one to herd me, impatient, giggling, warm-faced, back to the Audi so that I can get us back to where we both want to be.